Linguistic Diversity Challenge: Javanese - ꦧꦱꦗꦮ
What is the language called in English and the language itself? In English, the language is called Javanese. In Javanese, it is called basa Jawa: [bɔsɔ dʒɔwɔ].
Where is the language spoken? Javanese is spoken primarily on the island of Java in Indonesia; home to approximately 145 million people, it is the world’s most populous island. Most speakers of Javanese also speak Indonesian.
How many people speak the language? 82 million people are native speakers of Javanese, making it the largest language without an official status where it is spoken.
Which language family does it belong to? What are some of its relative languages? Javanese is a Malayo-Polynesian language of the Austronesian language family, however, it is distinct from its relatives. It is most closely related to languages spoken nearby such as Sudanese, Madurese and Balinese.
What writing system does the language use? Javanese is traditionally written in the Javanese script, known natively as askara Jawa, variant of the Kawi script which dates back to around the 8th century, itself a descendant of the Brahmi script. Thus, the script shares similarities with others of Southeast Asia. In the 19th century, Dutch colonisers began to replace the native Javanese script with the Latin script. Javanese now uses the Latin script for practical purposes such as displaying the language digitally.
What kind of grammatical features does the language have?
- Like other Austronesian languages, Javanese is an agglutinative language.
- The word order is typically SVO but the archaic VSO word order is sometimes still used.
- Verbs are not inflected for person/number but there are verb affixes which express the status of the subject or object of a sentence.
- There are no grammatical tenses; Javanese uses auxiliary words to express time.
- Registers are used to distinguish between formal, neutral and informal speech, all relative to the status of who is speaking to who.
What does the language sound like? Here is an example of Javanese spoken in the informal register
What do you personally find interesting about the language? I’ve been reading a lot about Austronesian languages recently and have been drawn to Javanese (as well as Balinese) because I find the script so beautiful!